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In Manchester, a Finish Few Will Forget

As Manchester City’s captain, Vincent Kompany was the first to raise the Premier League trophy, sharing the long-awaited moment with his teammates and the fans at Etihad Stadium.Credit
Peter Powell/European Pressphoto Agency

LONDON

It took the last-minute heroics that were once the staple of boyhood comic books to accomplish it, a turnabout on the last day of the season’s top-flight soccer competition that was so improbable that the winning coach, stunned, described it as “crazy” and said he felt about 90 years old.

Roberto Mancini, the Italian manager of Manchester City, is 47 and has some comic book qualities of his own. Not the least of these have been his matinee-idol looks and stylistic cool, which have combined with the influence of other continental European managers in the last decade to bring a new sophistication to the muddy-boots-and-beer traditions of English soccer.

Only time will tell whether Manchester City’s 3-2 victory Sunday against underdog Queens Park Rangers, eking out the narrowest of triumphs in a season-long contest with Manchester United for primacy in British soccer, marked the start of a new era — or a temporary blip in the dominance that Alex Ferguson, Manchester United’s manager, has achieved by winning 12 titles in the 20 seasons since the Premier League was founded.

For the moment, it seemed enough to savor what was hailed on every side as the most dramatic and improbable end to the English season anyone could remember, as well as what many commentators described as the climax to the greatest ever season of crosstown rivalry.

Despite the advantage of an extra man after Queens Park Rangers’ often-pugnacious captain, Joey Barton, was sent off for striking a City player early in the second half, City was trailing, 2-1, at the end of 90 minutes. Needing a win to finish ahead of Manchester United in the league standings, City scored twice in 125 seconds during injury time, securing the most unlikely of victories as the referee fingered his whistle.

Minutes earlier and 100 miles to the northeast, Manchester United had scored a 1-0 win against Sunderland, like Queens Park Rangers an also-ran in this season’s league race. When that game ended, Manchester City was still trailing with barely two minutes to play, allowing Manchester’s United’s players, along with Ferguson, to believe, for a sublime moment, that they had won the top division of English soccer for the 20th time since the forerunner of the Premier League was established in 1892.

But the improbable goals at Manchester City’s Etihad stadium — Edin Dzeko’s header at 1 minute 15 seconds of the five minutes of added time, and Sergio Agüero’s strike at 3:20 — left the two Manchester teams tied on top of the league with 89 points each. Manchester City’s title was secured by a superior goal difference — the measure of goals scored by a team during the 38-game season, against the goals scored by its opponents.

The win had the emotional force of an earthquake in Manchester, where United and City have been playing derbies since 1881, dividing the citizens for much of that time into two fiercely loyal camps — the red of Manchester United and the light blue of Manchester City.

For City’s fans, the win ended decades of mockery at the office water cooler, long years when United fans — and many of City’s — built up an anthology of jokes about City’s dismal performance. Typically, one City supporter greeted a new manager to the club in 1998 with a letter to The Manchester Evening News that wished him well “in the task of nailing jelly to the ceiling.”

There was more ridicule, painfully more, as Manchester United, under Ferguson, compiled a record over the last two decades of two victories in the UEFA Champions League and eight in the F.A. Cup, while Manchester City briefly disappeared into the third tier of English soccer, playing away games in rickety old wooden stadiums with crowds that numbered in the hundreds.

What had been the most famous of English soccer rivalries, drawing crowds of 80,000 in the 1930s and television audiences of 10 million in more recent times — one sixth of the British population — had become heavily one-sided, with Manchester City’s last championship season in the league’s old first division, now known as the Premier League, having come in 1968.

The passion that infused the rivalry has not been Manchester’s alone. Although Manchester City had dominated the competition for long periods, especially between the world wars, an air crash at Munich on Feb. 6, 1958, whose 20 victims included eight of United’s first-team players made United, for a generation, the nation’s team as well.

Photo

Manchester City fans stormed the field in celebration after the final whistle. For many, it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience; City last won the league title in 1968.Credit
Peter Powell/European Pressphoto Agency

For an English schoolboy of that era, images of the twisted, snow-blown wreckage of the aircraft, found to have crashed on takeoff because of icing on its wings, remain etched in the memory. So, too, does United’s astonishing rebirth in the months that followed, which included a heartbreaking 2-0 loss by a reconstituted United team to Bolton Wanderers three months later in the F.A. Cup final, then the undisputed climax to the English season.

When Ferguson became United’s manager in 1986 — a lengthy roll call of City managers ago — the club was going through doldrums of its own. He guided the team back to the pinnacle of British and European soccer, and oversaw the transition that came with the billions of dollars that have flowed into the Premier League, turning some of its top players into $320,000-a-week, nightclubbing, Ferrari-driving playboys, and the league into a global success, with fan clubs everywhere from Lagos to Tokyo.

But along the way, many fans in England have hankered for a break from the metronomic predictability of United’s wins. Many have found it in Mancini — a triple winner of the Italian league as a player, and twice more as manager of Inter Milan — who has withstood a battery of gibes in recent weeks from the 70-year-old Ferguson.

A Scotsman, Ferguson has described City condescendingly as “the noisy neighbors” and as “a small club with a small mentality,” and Mancini as “an Italian,” as if that was all that needed to be said about his cautious style of soccer emphasizing rock-solid defense. As for the Etihad stadium, five miles from United’s Old Trafford, Ferguson has dismissed it as “a temple of doom.”

On the back of a $1.5 billion investment in new players by City’s new owners, the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, Mancini has built, in three seasons, a team capable of establishing its own era of supremacy. As delirious supporters flooded onto the Etihad stadium turf waving flags that proclaimed “The city is ours!” and singing verses of the old Richard Rodgers ballad “Blue Moon” (“Now I’m no longer alone/ Without a dream in my heart/ Without a love of my own”), he sought to keep expectations in check, saying winning the title again and again, like United, would be the real test of success.

Finally, draped in Italy’s tricolor flag, he allowed himself a moment to admit, in a halting English largely learned since arriving in Manchester, the scale of what he, the team and the Abu Dhabi owners had accomplished. “Between winning and losing, there is a sea,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on May 14, 2012, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: An Afternoon and a Finish They Won’t Soon Forget. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe